Tennyson and his Qualms

So, presumably we are still in the rather short span that is the Romantic period of British literature when everyone was going crazy about nature and being an individual.  Everything is about finding one’s self in the peace that is the natural world, and really discovering what it means to be who you are.  Therefore, the message that Tennyson is trying to convey in his poem “The Lotos-Eaters” seems rather odd to me.  The bulk of the poem describes the grandeur and beauty that is the island of the Lotos-Eaters, and the image created by such a description is practically a romanticist’s perfect abode.  “A land of streams! some, like a downward smoke, /Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn, did go.”  Who could imagine a more perfect place; a land where time seems to stand at a barred gate with no hope of continuing; a land where the impossible has and still is achieved; a land where one could be alone for eternity?  Yet, the people who do live here are husks: empty shells of humans, with very little that makes them human left.  They chose to eat of the lotos’s and now feel no sense of adventure, no want to return to their home and their families, all loyalty to their captain lost.  It presents a rather dreary image of the Romantic era, and it almost seems like Tennyson is, in a way, criticizing the hermits and naturalists of the time that love the seclusion of nature above all else.  Why he chooses to say that I know not, but due to the fact that this land has the rather intriguing factor of time being still, it also seems that Tennyson is perhaps also criticizing people who refuse to allow progress in the world.  Honestly, I am really not quite sure what Tennyson is getting at, but it definitely seems that he is perhaps not so happy with some aspect of the world around him, but what it is exactly I cannot quite pinpoint.